Happy Reading

Welcome to the Atlassian newsletter. This month...  nifty FedEx day projects, updates to Fisheye, Crucible and Clover, new and improved plugins, the typical End of Financial Year pirate scavenger party and more. Happy reading!

Releases, Releases, Releases

Since coming on board last month, the Cenqua team has been flat out like a lizard drinking. We've updated FishEye and Crucible, revamped the FishEye plugin for JIRA, and finally let Clover 2 beta loose on the world.

If you use Subversion, CVS, or Perforce and aren't familiar with FishEye and Crucible you should really check them out. Every Java developer serious about testing should take a gander at the completely revamped Clover 2.

What are these products you speak of? Why should I install them?

Continue reading.

Atlassian "Fedex Day" VI

For those who don't know, "Fedex Day" is Atlassian's irregular answer to Google 20% time: time set aside for developers to work on whatever they want with a skew towards our products.

We tend to run "Fedex" with a fairly open format — you can do whatever you want as long as you can somehow relate it to our products. We have expanded it such that we set aside 1-1/2 days for the developers to complete their ideas. We start after lunch on a Thursday and work until 4pm Friday when we present what we have to everyone.

Here are the winning FedEx day projects this time 'round:

First Prize - JIRA Caller ID
JIRA Caller ID developed by Adrian Hempel set out to use Caller ID information from an Asterisk-based phone system to automatically retrieve the caller's information in JIRA. It turned out great, even including a call history embedded in JIRA where you could replay recorded calls.

Second Prize - Atlasbook
Second prize went to Atlassian founder Mike Cannon Brookes with his "evil-twisted-modification of Facebook for Atlassian's developers", Atlasbook. What it does is aggregate action data from various different external servers and display a single chronological feed.

What is more impressive is that "Cannon" wrote about 40 screens and did the whole thing in Groovy + Grails all in the Fedex timeframe.

Third Prize - Calling Bamboo
Samuel Le Berrigaud made Bamboo build status information available over the phone. Using VXML or VoiceXML he added voice recognition so that one could say which project they would like to know the status of. The plugin would then read the builds status through the phone.

Being a phone based plugin there is not much in the way of screenshots to show, but take my word for it, the demo was very cool.

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And those projects are just the tip of the iceberg. Check out all the FedEx day projects along with the rules — continue reading.

An X-Ray of Confluence

In many ways, Confluence has grown organically, and its dependency tree is no exception. Confluence has well over 100 open source dependencies which we ship with, and a dozen or so more used purely for testing.

The other day I was investigating some duplication in our Maven dependencies, and Sam recommended the JFrog dependency analyser. This screenshot shows the interesting output from analysing the dependencies of confluence-webapp on trunk.

Continue reading.

Cutlassian 2007

Historically at Atlassian, there are 3 big staff events during the year — Christmas, Melbourne Cup (or Superbowl if you're on the other side of the Pacific) and the End of Financial Year bash.

Over the years we've drunk & eaten far too much, raced go karts, shot paintballs, sailed yachts, rafted the white water and all manner of other things... so what next for our End of Financial Year 2007?

One of my favourite Steve Jobs quotes (along with Real Artists Ship) is "It's better to be a pirate than join the Navy" (read Pirate Flag). Come on... who didn't always want to be a pirate? And thus, Cutlassian was born.

Read the entire Cutlassian blog, which highlights pictures, videos, and details of our pirate day.

For some fun, watch the Cutlassian video on YouTube (8:17).

Guicing Up Crucible

Most Atlassian products use some inversion of control (IoC) container – Confluence uses Spring and JIRA uses Picocontainer. Newly acquired Fisheye and Crucible don't use any IoC at present, and as part of the process of choosing one we decided to spike using Guice as Crucible's IoC container.

We wanted to learn about Guice because it has some interesting differences compared to Spring:

• Configuration is in Java, not XML. This gives better compile time type checking, better refactoring support, and a more expressive configuration language.
• Injection is done via annotations instead of named attributes (you can do this with Spring 2 as well). This has the disadvantage that your concrete classes depend on Guice, but the advantage that the IoC container knows exactly which injections are expected, so that not providing a binding becomes an error at start up rather than a later NullPointerException.

Follow how Tom bootstrapped the container and developed a cookbook recipe - continue reading.

Plugins, Plugins, Plugins

As usual, we (Atlassian and the Developer Network) have been busy at work. Here are some of our latest plugin releases:

Dynamic Tasklist 2. Check! – When Developer Network member Bob Bargemen came forward with a new and improved Confluence Tasklist Macro, I jumped on it. We worked with Bob to tweak the new tasklist and add a couple of important features, and now we're able to release the result! (See screenshot.)

JIRA Labels Plugin 2.0 – We recently completed a major overhaul of the JIRA Labels Plugin with a primary focus on stability and performance. We've optimized the heck out of our Lucene usage, and we've cut down our javascript library dependencies to a bare minimum.

JIRA and VSS:  We Need Your Help – We've just released a beta version of the JIRA-VSS plugin that provide a mapping between JIRA Issues and Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe. Please give it a try and let us know what you find and think.

OpenID and Crowd SSO: TheServerSide Video Tech Brief

Want to learn more about OpenID and Crowd? Watch The ServerSide's Eugene Ciurana interview Justen Stepka, our lead developer of Crowd.

In the video, you'll learn how Crowd came about, how the new OpenID capability of Crowd 1.1 works, why OpenID is relevant to companies (esp. versus other standards like SAML), and what developers should know when implementing Crowd and OpenID.

Watch it here.

Our Reading List

Here are some blogs and sites we've been sharing around the office. Also a few interesting tidbits from Atlassian developers:

• Have an interview soon? Maybe you can relate to or prepare with these Thirteen Patterns of Programmer Interviews.
• One of our support staff members is a big fan on the Simpsonize Me site. Actually, she uses her simpsonized self- portrait on our Confluence intranet and on IM.
• Dushan, one of our JIRA developers, recently wrote about a little CSS print stylesheet tip that will be included in JIRA 3.11.
• Chris shares an interesting, extensive book review on Dreaming in Code.
• Think you know everything there is about URIs and web browers? So did Chris, until he discovered the magic data URLs protocol.
• See how Sam trimmed text with a CSS Overflow property in JIRA.
• Three interesting Confluence case studies: pharmaceutical; law; software and consulting.

Thanks for Reading

As always, thanks for reading. Also, let us know if there's something in particular you'd like to see in our newsletter.

Cheers!
Your Mates at Atlassian

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